think hard, think well

Now that I’ve finished my master’s degree and submitted about half of my doctoral applications, I have some time to relax and read for pleasure―and to blog a little. This is really the first time in a while that I haven’t had homework hanging over my head, all Damoclean-like. I took a winterim last year as well as a summer independent study (that turned into a summer-fall independent study!), so I’ve been going pretty much non-stop since I started at PBU last September.

My reading list is incredibly long, but with only three days per week of work at this point, I hope to take a considerable bite out of that list rather quickly. Right now I’m working on Hays’s The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Levitt’s SuperFreakonomics, and Richards’s Money, Greed and God. I also have quite a few more technical econ articles I’m excited about.

I’m also spending a lot more time just reading Hebrew and Greek rapidly. This morning I spent an hour-and-a-half doing my daily office from the BCP, because I decided to read all the biblical texts in Hebrew and Greek–one Psalm, and one passage each from the prophets, Revelation and the Gospels. It’s very rich and rewarding to read the original texts devotionally; I hope I’m getting better at seeing past the niphals and pluperfects in order to experience Christ in the texts. Tom Wright says that someone advised him early in his academic career to have one Bible for scholarly study and one Bible for devotional readings―and that, thankfully, he didn’t listen to this advice.

I’m hoping to pick up my German studies again in the New Year―my Austrian buddy has moved to MD but is willing to tutor me via Skype. I also want to get down with some Ugaritic; would anyone like to recommend a textbook?

I also have some time for research projects I’ve been meaning to finish. I did some work last year on Jewish self-identity and the matrilineal principle, and I need to revise my acrostics project based on some new reading I’ve done.

Hey, if I can accomplish half of this stuff in the spring, I’ll be a happy clam. What’s on TV?

Gary Schnittjer shared this in class on Tuesday, and I found it very interesting:

“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ … It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own … The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students … When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank… You have to be educated in order to be … a participant in our conversation … So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours … I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents … I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”

– ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.

I submitted my last paper at 10pm last night for the semester. I will be graduated Saturday with my master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Philadelphia Biblical University. Woohoo!

Being done is a real high. I didn’t have such an exciting experience when I completed my bachelor’s a few years back. I finished classes in May needing 6 science credits to graduate. I was planning to take a CLEP test in the summer, and then two community college classes in the fall if I couldn’t pass. So, I "graduated" on a Tuesday afternoon in July when I got the test results in the mail–sort of anticlimactic. I got my diploma in August. By the time I walked in May 2007, I had already been out of school and in the workforce for a year, I was getting married, etc. I had already moved on. I never had that emotional experience of pressing until the end, getting grades one by one, and walking in commencement ceremony all in one week.

But it’s done.

My wife is great–she has supported me emotionally and financially through these five graduate semesters–my sugar mamma. Thank you, Corrie–I love you!

Soli Deo Gloria.

Urban Conservative has a post on their blog entitled, "Global Warming Ate My Homework: 100 Things Blamed on Global Warming." I think my favorites are #39 and #62. I’m now on board–something must be done!

This week I asked a question about the meaning of the song, “You Said,” by Hillsong, particularly the chorus:

You said, “Ask, and I’ll give the nations to you.”
Oh Lord, that’s the cry of my heart.

I think that it’s from Psalm 2:7-8:

I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me,
"You are my Son; today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession."

It’s a promise made to David, but the NT authors take it christologically as referring to Jesus (Rom 1:4; Acts 13:33; Heb 1:5; 5:5). Since the inheritance given to Christ is given to the church in him, Psalm 2:7 can be understood as a promise given to the church (cf. Gal. 3:29, 2 Cor 1:20). It’s an example of what Richard Hays calls an ecclesiotelic hermeneutic, reading the church as the end (goal) of OT text and story. David didn’t understand fully—he thought that the promise was to him and his physical descendants, and that YHWH would give him political/military victory over the nations. But in Christ the nations have been reconciled as part of New Israel. The prophets often spoke more than they knew.

I’m not sure that Darlene Zschech and company consciously thought through all the NT passages, but they clearly read the OT ecclesiotelically—and I think it’s pretty cool.

Carpool Tunnel Syndrome:

When you are carpooling and you enter a dark tunnel and get that "uneasy feeling" as you sitting next to someone you don’t "Really" know.

Example:

On the way out of Boston, Sally got Carpool Tunnel Syndrome from the new guy John.

Question: have you ever thought about the song, “You Said,” by Hillsong, specifically, where the chorus comes from?

You said, “Ask, and I’ll give the nations to you.”
Oh Lord, that’s the cry of my heart.

I’m still quite sore from a Saturday morning game of touch football played with some friends and coworkers. I’m not the most limber person in the world, and when I’m out of shape and do a lot of running my hamstrings become tighter than the discourse of the Joseph Novella.

Nevertheless, I enjoy football. I think I have the body for it–6’3", about 225 lbs., not as much muscle as there could be, though. As a homeschool student, I never got the change to play high-school sports like Tim Tebow did. Sometimes I feel about sports the way Lady Catherine de Bourgh felt about music:

"There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient."

I was thinking about the various aspects of athletic competitions and games that make them fun. Some sports are contests in a single area of strength (track and field). Others are individual games (tennis, golf, racing). Within the genre of team sports, some are relatively simple and elegant with few "arbitrary" rules, such as soccer and hockey. These games are relatively simple: get the ball/puck in the net, and don’t hurt each other (too badly).

Football and baseball have so many rules. I like these sports most because they require learning context and history to understand. Why does an incomplete pass or a run out of bounds stop the clock, but a tackle in bounds does not? Because in the early days of football they may have only had one or two game balls, and countless minutes of game time was wasted trying to find errant passes that went into the crowd. Who thought up the infield fly rule? Why does the second baseman not have to touch second base when turning a double play? Rules have stories, and stories are fun.

My sister, Rebekah–formerly of ThinkHardThinkWell, now at The Primary Word–will present a summary of her Honors Thesis at Philadelphia Biblical University on Wednesday, November 4.  The lecture is entitled, “YHWH’s Cult Statues: ‘Image of God’ in an Ancient Near Eastern Context.”  It will be held at 8 PM in classroom BL225.  If you are available that evening, please do consider coming and also feel free to invite others to this event.  This will be a fun and interesting lecture–see the abstract below.

If you can’t make it, you should still read her earlier posts here entitled, “YHWH’s Cult Statues” (part1, part 2).

See you there!

_____

Abstract: “YHWH’s Cult Statues: ‘Image of God’ in an Ancient Near Eastern Context.”

Most Christians in our culture know the Bible teaches that humans were created in the “image of God,” however, there is much debate on what precisely this means. Some scholars on ancient Mesopotamian religions suppose that the reason the ancient Israelites were commanded by their God not to make “graven images” is because humanity was created in the “image of God.” Therefore, YHWH God, unlike the gods of the polytheistic Mesopotamian peoples, was not to be represented in statuary form (the graven image), for humanity was created as YHWH’s unique form of divine representation. This lecture will discuss the function of Mesopotamian cult statues as divine representation in order to better understand the term “image of god” in an ancient Near Eastern context and also how humans may function as images of YHWH God.